Distributed Amount Projections are about taking a total amount for something, say a project cost, and spreading it over several timeperiods. There are several ways you could spread a cost in this way, the common ones being to spread it uniformly (ie at a constant rate using UniSpread) or to spread it according to an S-curve (SCurve), which generally concentrates most of the cost centrally in the duration of the project.
There are 4 families in the Distributed Amount Projections category:
- The basic Time Spread family contains all the no-frills basic functions of the Distributed Amount Projections category. These start from the building block UniSpread function which simply spreads an amount uniformly, through to functions that spread amount according to a specified curve, such as SCurve and the highly generalised DistSpread. Finally there are a couple of functions, TStepSpread and FStepSpread, which spread an amount according to stepped annual rates that you specify, with the function just determining either the Start or Finish date.
- The Time Spread Periodic family takes the basic time spread functions and allows you to repeat the spreading process at intervals, for example for maintenance upgrades, workovers and refitting.
- The Time Spread Weighted family is for functions where you want more control over the distribution or pattern of disbursement. WeightSpread is the most general of this family, enabling you to specify any number of Weights, which are applied at equal intervals between Start and Finish to spread the overall Total. If you don"t want the Weights spread equally you can use FWeightSpread or TWeightSpread.
- The Time Spread History family is a set of time spread functions adapted for use in budgeting situations where you have historic payments (PmtsHistory) or ActualsToDate. What these functions do is a straightforward Time Spread function but, in the case of forecast payments, adjusted so that the overall Total projected is unchanged by the historic payments. This turns out to be a useful technique for budgets that are constantly updated, where you can either choose to update the PmtsHistory with the actuals (as in SCurveH), or specify the ActualsToDate (as in SCurveAdj).
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